Backlog at Houston immigration court at record high

Judges are overwhelmed here as average wait time for cases hits 555 days

The backlog of cases at Houston's immigration court has reached a record high because of a shortage of judges and the after-effects of the government shutdown, pushing some court hearings into 2017 and beyond.

The four judges assigned to Houston's downtown immigration court had 16,647 pending cases as of November, an increase of more than 250 percent from that court's pending caseload in 2009, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering and research organization at Syracuse University. Wait times also increased to an average of 555 days locally, up from 298 in 2009.

Gordon Quan, a Houston immigration attorney, said some clients have grown increasingly frustrated with the repeated delays, which often force them to reapply for work authorization and renew their fingerprint checks.

"Some people want justice," he said. "They want their cases heard."

Quan said he recently told a client who came to the U.S. without authorization 18 years ago that he would be looking at waiting several years for his immigration case to come up in court. "He said, 'I've got a wife and a kid. I want to at least tell my story to a judge.'"

Quan's response: "Good luck."

Officials with the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which administers the immigration court system for the Department of Justice, have acknowledged for years the need to hire more judges.

In 2009, the agency had 237 judges and more than 223,000 pending cases, according to TRAC data. Since then, the number of judges has grown to 252, while the number of cases on the docket has continued to swell to 350,000, the data shows. The agency has 32 vacant immigration judge positions, said Kathryn Mattingly, an EOIR spokeswoman.

"We are just woefully under-resourced at this time," said Judge Dana Leigh Marks, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

"We are drowning," said Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco. "The volume is just overwhelming and because of the responsibility that the judges have - you have people's lives in your hands - you have this tremendous pressure to do the right thing, with the same pressure to work as quickly as possible. And it becomes extremely grueling."

Statewide, TRAC data shows there were more than 50,000 cases pending in Texas as of November. Houston's downtown court led the state, followed by San Antonio with 12,400 cases and El Paso with 7,792.

The court in Houston's immigration detention center, which has two judges, had 1,293 pending cases, according to TRAC.

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Immigration attorney Raed Gonzalez said that because of the furlough that shut down the government in early October, he has clients whose cases were pending since 2012 who have had hearings scheduled out two and three years.

"It's ridiculous," he said. "We're talking about 2016 and 2017."

Marks, the judge, said there is a "potential tsunami" of judge retirements in the pipeline, with an estimated 100 of the 250 judges eligible in 2014. With morale at an all-time low, she said, there is growing concern that more judges will leave the bench soon.

"It's simply becoming impossible," Marks said. "There does not seem to be any end in sight."